Reviews

• “He releases an ancient, urban miasma that rises from the page, untroubled by electric illumination, allowing us to inhale what Shakespeare's contemporary Thomas Dekker called "that thick tobacco-breath which the rheumaticke night throws abroad"”

  – Independent

• “One of the most brilliant of the younger generation of English critics.”

  – Terry Eagleton

• “Nothing less than a grand unifying theory of the counter-enlightenment.”

  – Will Self

• “Part literary criticism, part social history, part polemic, this is a haunting addition to the canon of psychogeography.”

  – Financial Times

• “An important and lively book”

  – Times Higher Education

• “A historical guide to the capital, Beaumont details everything including the 'villainous' common nightwalkers and prostitutes of the middle ages and Charles Dickens’s time as an insomniac.”

  – Dazed & Confused

• “A wonderful book, that has many fascinating things to say about the night-time life of our capital down the ages. Rarely has a book on the subject of darkness been so illuminating; all insomniacs should read it.​”

  – Ian Thomson, Standard

• “The joy of Beaumont’s book is the way it illuminates both literature and urban politics through the splendors and panics of their nighttime journeys.”

  – Flavorwire

• “Rarely has a book about darkness been so illuminating.”

  – Ian Thomson, Spectator, Books of the Year

• “An enthralling study of London after dark.... This is an impressive, magisterial book whose steady, earnest gaze also encompasses the lives of pickpockets and poets.”

  – Robert McCrum, Guardian

• “In Nightwalking, Matthew Beaumont rubs shoulders with the deviants, dissidents and dispossessed who lurk in the shadows of Shakespeare, Johnson, Blake and De Quincey.”

  – Evening Standard

• “In this teeming and glorious book, Matthew Beaumont probes far into the shadows.”

  – Alexandra Harris, Times Literary Supplement

• “This is a book pulsing with life, just as the streets do, despite attempts to cut that liminal, semi-illicit life off. The foreword and afterword, by Will Self, beautifully bracket the book, reinforcing the idea that the city is layered over time, and that each layer is accessible, and can be made vivid in the imagination. Why Nightwalking has not won a major award is beyond mine.”

  – Nicholas Lezard, Guardian